Our next big stop was to be Fox Glacier, but the road there from Abel Tasman is the legendary west coast highway, so we took a travel day to make sure we could experience the drive during daylight. It was a day well spent. This fabled section of highway is only three or four hundred kilometers long, but it is a twisty road and you are rarely able to travel faster than 50km/h. That being said, you really don’t want to drive this road faster than 20. We spent the whole drive admiring the ocean a few meters off to our right, steep cliffs and rainforest on the left, and the peaks of Fiordland (including Mt. Cook, NZ’s highest peak) stood ahead. Lookout points and trails abounded, and somehow we managed to stop for every single one. The highlight was probably the pancake rocks – odd formations with distinct horizontal bands every foot or so, maybe a couple hundred feet tall, jutting out into the Tasman Sea. The day wasn’t about a highlight though – the whole journey was amazing. We camped in the mountains that night, a waterfall maybe 20 meters away lulling us to sleep. Free camping is definitely the way to go.

Our tour to Fox Glacier left at 8 the next morning, and somehow we arrived early. Guided tours are the only way to see the glacier up close at the best of times, and we got pretty lucky with our timing. Huge storms during the previous weeks had battered the glacier, and we were in the first group of people to climb it in 12 days – awesome for us, as not a footprint was evident, but horrible for our guide, who had to pick out safe routes for us and carve many a step into steep ice faces. We crossed many “do not enter” barriers on the way in, but apparently this isn’t warning enough for some people – a few months earlier a couple of Australian guys had crossed the barriers unguided and approached the leading face of the glacier. They were crushed by tens of thousands of tonnes of ice. Beware.

The biggest danger on the way in was the risk of landslides. The intense rains had made much of the ground unstable, and the side of one mountain had given way, taking the access road with it. That meant a long, “dangerous” walk for us. I use the quotes because I’m pretty sure tourists wouldn’t be allowed in if there was a significant chance of danger, but the guiding company took safety pretty seriously nonetheless. For example, they had many of their guides stationed throughout the rockslide zone, “the gunbarrels”, watching the mountains with binoculars. As we passed through the section, our guide was in constant contact with them via walkie-talkie. He pointed out a bus-sized rock sitting next to the trail – last week it had been sitting at the top of the mountain, and a trail of crushed vegetation was visible snaking down the mountainside to where the rock now lay. After seeing that, we all understood why the lookouts were posted.

A brief session on how to use cramp-ons (metal spikes that attach to your boots), and we headed onto the ice. Walking with the things took a bit of getting used to, as your shoes were now about 3 inches taller and it was easy to snag a pantleg with a spike. The actual experience of walking on the glacier was amazing though. The thing was just so massive – 20km long, hundreds of meters wide, and also hundreds of meters thick. Our guide dutifully hacked steps on any steep sections, and spotted us when the path led us near some of the bigger holes and crevices – most of these act as drains and are continually expanded by rainfall; they run hundreds of meters down to the bottom of the glacier. Fall down one of these and no one will be able to get to your body until the glacier advances to the point where you got stuck, probably in a few centuries. Because of all these hazards the going was necessarily slow, which I found incredibly frustrating at first; once I learned to relax and just bask in the surroundings I had an amazing time though.

Because of the glacier’s situation in a mountain valley, direct sun was scarce. Our morning hike managed to bring us across the width of the glacier to a patch of sun on the far side. As we found boulders to sit on our guide pointed out a precarious pile of rocks above, sternly warning us to stay away. Halfway through lunch one of these boulders, about half the size of a car, spontaneously fell from the pile and slid part of the way down the hill towards us. The ever-changing nature of glacial environments makes them treacherous indeed.

After lunch we hiked straight up the glacier, onto the smooth blue ice that makes glacier so surreally beautiful. We actually ended up getting quite close to the serac field about 2km up the glacier, an achievement no one really expected when we set out that morning. Seracs are towers of ice, some 30 meters tall, that form when the glacier cracks as it goes around the bend in the valley. These also have a habit of toppling randomly, and we stayed well clear. Apparently on summer days it’s a common hobby to go up there and watch the seracs – they fall with astonishing frequency, and the roar they let off when they collapse is deafening.

This has been a rambling post already, but there’s one more kinda neat thing about the glacier that I want to point out, knowing that I’m probably crossing the line towards sounding too much like Lonely Planet. While global warming is causing the vast majority of the world’s glaciers to recede, Fox is growing. Pretty much, higher temperatures = increased evaporation off the Tasman Sea = increased snowfall over the mountains = increased glacier growth; glaciers grow from the top and are slide down the mountain – the leading edge is the oldest ice.

We stopped for dinner at the Hard Antler in the tiny town of Haast, and camped that night next to a river, 50m from a lake. We didn’t actually see the lake when we pulled in that evening, but found its shore to be an excellent spot for breakfast the next morning.